Lost Notebooks of John Hilliard

A New Edition of Clarke's Comprehensive History of Magic

In 1935 John Northern Hilliard died suddenly while in a hotel room in Indianapolis. When the book on which he had worked for so many years, Greater Magic, was eventually published in 1938, hundreds of the tricks Hilliard had collected were nowhere to be found. There was a great hubbub about the missing material. A number of magicians entered the hotel room where he died ... perhaps one of them left with something?

A decade ago a box full of old magic catalogues was sold at an auction in middle America. At the bottom of this box, and not even listed in the contents, were two old notebooks-hundreds of typed pages in brown leatherette bindings. The lost notebooks of John Northern Hilliard had been found.